Sale full-back Rob Miller admits that the Sharks’ serial offenders need to curb the ill-discipline that is blighting their battle to beat relegation.

Sale full-back Rob Miller admits that the Sharks’ serial offenders need to curb the ill-discipline that is blighting their battle to beat relegation.

Saturday’s 29-3 defeat at Gloucester was marked by a horrific penalty count against the Sale squad with Steve Diamond’s men being penalised 21 times by rookie referee Luke Pearce.

Some of the official’s decision making baffled Diamond and the Sale players – not least the fact that Gloucester earned 10 out of 10 decisions awarded at the scrum. And that was manna from heaven for a kicker as pin-point accurate as Gloucester’s Freddie Burns, who slotted over five first-half penalties and booted 19 points in total.

Small wonder, then – given the number of penalties conceded by the Sale squad – that Miller admitted the rock-bottom Sharks were authors of their own downfall in the West Country.

And with high-flying Northampton arriving at Barton on Friday night for a crucial league encounter, Miller admits Sale need to be squeaky clean if they are to have any hope of registering a fourth successive win on home soil.

“We all need to work on our discipline. Individually we all need to look at ourselves,” admitted the England Saxons star.

“We will also look at the tape in our review and see what lessons we learn from there. With kickers as good as Freddie Burns around, you can’t afford to give teams easy points like that.

“And I think we found on Saturday that once the scoreboard starts ticking, it builds a momentum and perhaps increases the pressure.

“Then you start chasing the game a bit and errors creep in.

“So we’ve got to look at that especially given the poor weather conditions which were at Kingsholm and which we are likely to have over the next few months.

“I think Saturday’s game plan was right, it was more down to our individual errors and things.

“Obviously, everyone is hurting from what happened at the weekend but we are all tight as a group.

“The work rate is there during the week, it’s just a case of transferring that to the match days.

“But the spirit throughout the playing squad and the management is really good.

“Obviously, Northampton have got a really good squad and, even if they lose a few players to the international teams, they still have a very powerful group of players who can step in and do a job and we’re more than aware of that.

“We will study them closely this week. It’s a short turnaround from the Gloucester match but it’s a big game and we will be ready for it.”

Meanwhile, John Mitchell is at long last set to arrive back at Carrington and officially take up his post as a coaching consultant with the Sharks.

The former All Blacks head coach, who last week stepped down as Golden Lions head coach in South Africa, was due back in the UK today and was expected to immediately link up with the Sharks on his arrival.

Our newspapers include the flagship Manchester Evening News - Britain's largest circulating
regional daily with up to 130,485 copies - as well as 20 local weekly titles across Greater
Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire.

Free morning newspaper, The Metro, published every weekday, is also part of our portfolio,
delivering more than 200,000 readers in Greater Manchester.

Greater Manchester Business Week is the region’s number one provider of business news andfeatures, targeting a bespoke business audience with 12,687 copies every Thursday.

Every month, M.E.N. Media’s print products reach 2.2 million adults, spanning from Accrington
in the north to Macclesfield in the south.